Love and truth: the charity of the confessor

1. The false choice

The objection lives on a dichotomy: love here, truth there, and a forced choice between them. But the dichotomy is imported, not Christian. Its unspoken premise is that love is a feeling of acceptance and truth an assertion of fact, so that to insist on the second must wound the first. Scripture knows no such division. It commands, in a single breath, that we speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15), joining the two so tightly that neither survives the amputation of the other. Truth spoken without love is a hammer; love that will not speak the truth is a lie told to spare feelings. The Church has always sought the third thing the world cannot imagine, which is truth that is itself an act of love.

2. Christ is both, and they are one in Him

The reason the two cannot finally be opposed is that they meet in one Person. He who said I am the truth (John 14:6) is the same of whom it is written that God is love (1 John 4:8); the Truth and the Love are not two gods in tension but one Lord. Whatever pits love against truth pits Christ against Himself. And St Paul, who wrote the greatest hymn to love in all literature, wrote in the same hand that love rejoiceth in the truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Charity is not indifferent to what is true; it delights in it, and grieves at its denial, as a mother rejoices in her child's health and cannot be neutral about its sickness. A love that shrugs at heresy is not a greater love but a lesser one, a love that has stopped caring what becomes of the beloved.

3. Severity as a form of love

Once this is seen, the Fathers' famous harshness toward heresy stops looking like a failure of love and starts looking like its instrument. Their severity had three objects, and each was an object of love. It loved the faithful, whom false teaching would poison, and a shepherd who will not drive the wolf from the fold does not love the sheep, whatever he feels for the wolf. It loved the heretic himself, for the sharp word aimed to wound the error and so to save the man, on the apostolic pattern of the servant who in meekness instructs those that oppose themselves, if God peradventure will give them repentance (2 Tim. 2:24 to 25). And above both it loved the Truth who is a Person, with the jealousy proper to love, refusing to see Him misrepresented and dishonoured in His own house. St Paul's twice repeated anathema against the preacher of another gospel (Gal. 1:8 to 9) stands three chapters before his hymn to the fruit of the Spirit, whose first name is love; the same apostle wrote both, and saw no contradiction, because there is none.

4. The warning of Ephesus

Yet the tradition guards this claim against the confessor's own besetting sin, and it does so in a text this library must not omit. To the church at Ephesus the risen Lord speaks first in praise, and the praise is precisely for its discernment:

Here is the whole peril of the subject in three verses. The Ephesians did exactly what this library commends: they tested those who claimed authority, refused to bear the evil, and exposed the liars. And the Lord commends them for it, without qualification. Then, in the same breath, He convicts them, not of testing too harshly, but of having lost, somewhere in the testing, their first love. The passage does not retract the praise; it completes it. Discernment is required, and discernment is not enough. A man may be entirely right about every heretic he names and have become, in the naming, a stranger to the love for whose sake the naming was worth doing. The confessor who forgets this has kept the letter of Ephesus' virtue and fallen under its rebuke.

5. Hate the error, love the man

The distinction that keeps the two together is ancient and exact: the error is to be hated, the man who holds it loved, and the whole art of confession lies in never confusing them. St Augustine gave the rule its classic form, that we are to act with love for men and hatred of vices, so that the hatred never migrates from the sin to the sinner.

This is why the true confessors weep. St Paul warned the Ephesian elders of the coming wolves night and day with tears (Acts 20:31); he named his enemies of the cross of Christ weeping (Phil. 3:18). The great separations of the tradition were made in grief, not triumph, by men who would have given their lives to have them not be necessary. The surgeon who lances the wound does not enjoy the knife; he grieves the disease that requires it. A separation made with relish, with the satisfaction of being proved right, with contempt for those on the other side of the wall, has already failed the test of Ephesus, however correct its doctrine.

6. The counterfeit: zeal without love

For there is a counterfeit of confession, and it is the very thing the objectors accuse all confessors of being. It has the words of zeal and the heart of bitterness; it uses the faith as a weapon for the wounds of its own pride; it separates not to guard the truth but to be seen guarding it, and finds in every controversy the occasion it was seeking. This library has warned against it under other names, the private judgment that usurps the synod, the wall that hardens into a counter church. Here it must be named for what it is at the root: a failure of love wearing the mask of a love of truth. The remedy is not less truth but more love, the recovery of the first love without the surrender of the discernment, both together, as at Ephesus both were required.

7. The measure that remains

This study answers the objection but does not exempt the one who makes the separation from being measured by it. Every reader tempted to the wall should hear the question of Ephesus as addressed to himself first: not only, is this teaching heresy, but, am I acting in love or in bitterness; do I grieve this wound or relish it; have I kept my first love. Where the answer is bitterness, the fault is not in the doctrine of walling off but in the heart that would abuse it, and the counsel is the same the tradition always gives, examined in the lesson on private judgment. Love does not make the truth optional; it makes the confessor honest. And only the confession made in love is the confession the canon crowns.